Red Cross team takes custody of bodies of Gaza hostages

October 18, 2025

Red Cross team receives bodies of Gaza hostages — Displaced Palestinians, returning to Al-Gabari neighbourhood today, face scenes of devastation in Gaza City

Two Coffins, One Crossing: A Fragile Pause Between Grief and Politics

The Red Cross convoy moved like a slow heartbeat through a landscape that has forgotten what calm feels like. Two black coffins — wrapped and sealed, anonymous and yet unbearably specific — were handed over in southern Gaza and placed under international custody as part of a fragile truce that has, for now, reduced bullets to paperwork and the worst kind of bargaining to logistics.

“They told us they were on their way to Israeli and ISA forces,” an Israeli military statement read, clinical and deliberate. But statements never capture the tremor in a neighbour’s voice when they hear the word ‘coffin’ or the way a street that housed laughter now echoes with photo posters of the missing. “We need closure,” said one relative of a hostage, speaking outside a Tel Aviv hospital. “We need to know. Even this — even their bodies — must come home.”

Numbers on a Scale Too Human

The exchange of remains is small arithmetic against an enormous ledger of loss. According to officials relaying the fragile tally, Israel returned 15 Palestinian bodies today — bringing the number handed back to Gaza to 135 — while Hamas has handed over all 20 surviving hostages and the remains of 10 out of 28 known deceased under the current agreement.

Statistics like these are meant to be precise, but they land like stones in the mouths of those who must live with them. “When you’re counting people, every statistic is a family,” said Dr. Leila Haddad, a humanitarian policy specialist based in Amman. “Numbers matter for negotiations, but they never replace the texture of grief.”

The Rafah Bottleneck: Politics at the Border

Border crossings have become more than checkpoints; they are political instruments. Rafah — the only Gaza crossing previously not under Israeli control — remains shuttered since May 2024 when Israel took control of the Gaza side. Cairo had signalled a possible reopening, but Jerusalem was quick to dampen expectations.

“The opening will be considered based on how Hamas fulfills its part — returning the deceased and implementing the framework,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said, tightening the valve on movement yet again. For Gazans, the difference between a crossing that opens and one that stays closed is not abstract: it is medicine arriving or an ambulance idling in the dark; it is a university student missing exams in Cairo or a grandmother unable to see grandchildren who have long lived in Egypt.

Before the war, more than two million people lived squeezed into Gaza’s 365 square kilometres. A functioning Rafah would allow for medical referrals, family reunions and the flow of humanitarian supplies that a battered health system so sorely needs.

On the Ground: The Wastewater, the Rubble, the Human Will

Tom Fletcher, the UN relief coordinator, drove through neighbourhoods that used to be ordinary streets and found “vast wastelands.” He and his team inspected a wastewater treatment plant in Sheikh Radwan where pumps were smashed, and sewage pooled in the wreckage. “This is about dignity,” Fletcher told reporters as he watched residents attempt to dig latrines among the ruins. “We have a 60-day surge plan — a million meals a day, tents for winter, rebuilding health services. But it’s a massive, massive job.”

The UN figures provided to mediators show that 950 trucks crossed into Gaza from Israel on Thursday — a crucial lifeline but barely a bandage over a wound that will take years to heal. Aid agencies continue to press for Rafah to be reopened to speed the flow of food, fuel and medicines. Turkey has reportedly staged search-and-rescue teams at the Egyptian border, waiting for permission to assist in body-recovery efforts.

When Ceasefire Lines Blur: The Bus and the Yellow Line

Even as negotiators tally exchanges and plan aid convoys, violence punctuates the ceasefire’s margins. Gaza’s civil defence agency says nine members of the Abu Shabaan family were killed when, returning to check a home in Zeitun, the bus they were on was hit. The Israeli military says troops fired after a vehicle crossed the so-called “yellow line,” a buffer established in the agreement, claiming that warning shots were ignored and that the vehicle posed an imminent threat.

“We were trying to see if anything was left of our house,” said a neighbour who helped recover bodies. “There was shouting, then silence. It breaks you — how quickly a day can flip from hope to ashes.”

Such incidents underscore how brittle the pause is. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have returned to northern Gaza since the truce, but many now find their homes unrecognisable: streets gone, landmarks buried, neighbourhoods transformed into unmarked fields of rubble.

Faces of the Conflict: Personal Stories and Political Echoes

One of the bodies returned to Israel was identified as Eliyahu Margalit, 75, who was killed during the 7 October 2023 attack that sparked this long war. “He leaves behind a wife, three children, grandchildren,” read an official notice. His daughter, Nili, had been freed earlier under the exchange agreement. “Eliyahu loved gardening,” Nili told a reporter at a memorial. “Even now, all I want is his little hands back, the smell of him, the soil under his nails.”

On the other side of the boundary, Gaza families fold photos into their pockets and carry them like talismans. An informal shrine in a refugee camp held laminated portraits of the missing, strings of plastic beads and small cups of tea. “We hang pictures at the market and at mosques,” said Layla, a volunteer with a local aid group. “People look at them as they buy bread. We need them to remember names.”

What This Means Beyond the Border

There are larger questions that refuse to stay in the realm of statements and tallies. What does dignity mean in a city without running water? How do societies hold memory when nearly every physical marker is destroyed? And for Israelis watching their leaders, what does it mean to demand accountability while the machinery of politics grinds on?

Prime Minister Netanyahu declared he will run in the November 2026 elections, telling a right-wing channel, “Yes, I intend to run — and I expect to win.” It is a reminder that wartime decisions are folded into election cycles, that grief and national security become campaign issues, and that accountability — at home and abroad — is never far from electoral calculus.

“Politics will try to harvest from grief,” said Professor Jonathan Weiss, a political scientist who studies conflict and reconciliation. “But the real work is rebuilding infrastructure, restoring trust, and creating space where families can mourn without being drawn into the machinery of politics.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

As the coffins move, as trucks queue and as negotiators haggle over crossings and crossings of lines, the people of Gaza and Israel live in the margin between temporary relief and enduring settlement. The exchange of bodies is one narrow corridor of closure in a broader maze of loss, displacement and political urgency.

What would true progress look like? It might begin with safe, predictable crossings; with uninterrupted aid pipelines; with a credible, independent inquiry into civilian casualties; and with a commitment to rebuild — not just buildings, but systems that protect health, education and livelihoods. It might also begin with small acts: neighbours sharing tea across a demolished courtyard; families naming their dead, aloud, in public spaces; medics being able to work without fear of a sudden strike.

Can grief be negotiated? Not really. Can dignity be restored? Perhaps, but only if the pause becomes more than a temporary stopgap and becomes a path toward real accountability and reconstruction. In the meantime, two coffins, 950 trucks, and the faces at shrines remind us that the human cost is immediate, the politics unrelenting, and the need for compassion — and concrete action — as urgent as ever.

In Trump’s America, One Week Can Upend the Political Landscape

hanad

October 18, 2025

A week is a very long time in politics in Trump's America — Donald Trump commuted the seven-year prison sentence imposed on disgraced former congressman George Santos

A Week That Felt Like a Year: Washington’s Thunderstorm of Politics and People

There are phrases that feel tired until a moment demands them. “A week is a long time in politics” is one of those old saws — and this week, it felt like an understatement. Walking the streets between rallies and press rooms, one senses the country being tugged in a dozen directions at once: from court filings to kitchen-table anxieties, from foreign capitals back to the small towns that sell soybeans to the world.

It began with a phone ping — the kind of headline that has the power to momentarily stop a newsroom. The president announced a clemency move for a former congressman whose rise and fall had been tabloid theater and civic scandal combined. The reaction ranged from triumphant whoops at some rallies to weary dismay in living rooms where people are watching paychecks and prices shrink instead of news cycles expand.

The street’s answer: protest, prayer and sting of pepper

In Chicago, the hour after sundown looked as if it had been lifted from a dystopian postcard. A small but determined crowd gathered outside an ICE detention center — clergy among them, civic organizers, families who had come to watch loved ones led away. Videos filmed on phones now trace the arc of the night: officers pushing back, pepper-balls arcing through the air, and, in one gut-punching frame, a pastor in his collar recoiling as a spray finds his face.

“I was praying,” said Father Miguel Santos (not the politician), his voice still raspy from the sting. “We came to sing and to ask for mercy. You don’t come to a fence to be shot at like an animal.”

The scale of the immigration enforcement effort has swollen. According to figures circulating from the Department of Homeland Security this week, ICE said it received more than 150,000 applications after a recruitment push and has issued roughly 18,000 tentative job offers on top of roughly 6,500 current staffers. Independent analysts have pointed to a far larger footprint: a Cato Institute data leak suggested that more than 25,000 officers — including nearly 14,500 federal agents seconded from agencies like the FBI and ATF — have been detailed into immigration task forces.

Those numbers aren’t abstract. They have meaning in midwestern fields where seasonal workers have traditionally harvested crops, and on city sidewalks where people ask whether the state’s capacity to police is growing faster than its ability to build trust.

Fields, Food and Finance: Where Policy Meets the Dinner Table

Out on the plains — where a single crop can make or break a county — farmers say they’re seeing the consequences. The Department of Labor raised its own red flag this week about labor shortages in agriculture tied to the enforcement surge, warning of potential disruptions in the food supply chain. In the U.S., even when shortages don’t result in empty shelves, they translate quickly into higher prices — a brutal arithmetic for households where half the population already reports difficulty covering bills.

“We missed a third of our crew this season,” said Rachel Fleming, who runs a midsize soybean farm in Iowa. “The bins are full but the barns are empty. The market doesn’t care about our prayers.”

Markets elsewhere threw up their own alarms. Gold jumped nearly 10 percent in a single week, a move that economists call a flight to safety. For a brief, dramatic moment gold’s market valuation edged past the euro as the second-largest store of value after the U.S. dollar — a symbolic if brittle measure of where global investors are putting faith amid political uncertainty and high interest rates.

These ripples feed into wider anxieties: rising mortgage costs, a housing shortfall, and climbing delinquency in auto loans and subprime mortgages. The vocabulary of crisis — “déjà vu,” “2008,” “systemic stress” — crept back into boardrooms and coffee shops alike.

Capitol Shutdown: A Normalized Abnormality

Meanwhile, the federal government has been operating in a kind of bureaucratic limbo. Weeks into a partial shutdown, life in Washington had an odd, numb rhythm: the military kept getting paid, social safety nets continued to drip, and many federal workers were furloughed or told to operate without a paycheck. For some, the shutdown has become routine — not the emergency it used to be.

“We’re used to the theatrics,” said a congressional staffer who asked not to be named. “But used doesn’t mean okay. It’s hard to serve people when your own house isn’t being funded.”

Political maneuvers pepper the stalemate. A newly elected representative in Arizona remains unwelcome on the House floor despite having won a by-election; when seated, she plans to push to unseal archival documents tied to a high-profile criminal investigation that many hoped would lead to fuller transparency.

Foreign Deals, Media Wars and the Shape of Power

Global diplomacy and domestic politics collided this week in ways that felt jarringly close to home. A presidential trip brought a fragile phase-one peace announcement in the Middle East to the headlines even as neither principal belligerent showed up at the signing table. At the same time, Washington quietly OK’d a multibillion-dollar currency swap to prop up a friendly foreign government — a move that infuriated public servants on furlough and farmers who say their exports are collateral damage in trade wars.

“Why are we bailing out another country while my paycheck is on hold?” asked Jason Lee, a civil servant at a federal agency who is furloughed. “It looks like politics, not policy.”

Back home, the Pentagon touched off a fresh storm by limiting press access — asking journalists to sign agreements barring disclosure of unauthorized material. Major media outlets refused; several lost their accreditation. Veteran defense reporters compared it to a blunt attempt to control the narrative, and press freedom advocates saw it as another skirmish in a larger erosion of transparency.

At the same time, the shape of American media was changing. Consolidations and billionaire backers loomed, with major acquisitions hinting at a future where a few tech-financial conglomerates could wield enormous sway over what people see and hear.

Enemies, Courts and the Long View

On the legal front, the administration’s list of targets continued to grow. Former senior officials and critics saw charges leveled for alleged mishandling of information; lawyers argued about precedent and motive. The repetition of legal fights — and the hiring of lawyers associated with post-election challenges — suggested an internal logic: when politics is war, courts are battlefields.

“This is about power, more than justice,” said Laura Kim, a constitutional law professor. “We’ve moved into a season where litigation is a tool of governance.”

So What Now? Pulling Threads Together

There is a cheap comfort in saying a week will pass and things will return to normal. But normal has been stretched thin, like taffy. People are watching the price of grains, their neighbors’ paychecks, the makeup of national police forces, and the credentials of a free press. They’re asking whether democracy can weather the accumulation of these strains.

Will “No Kings Day” — a network of protests that attracted millions in the spring — be stronger this round, or will fatigue dim the resistance? Will policy choices on migration and enforcement be adjusted to protect both borders and communities? Will market nervousness be soothed or sharpened by decisions in the coming weeks?

These aren’t questions for pundits only. They are the lived realities of people standing in lines at food banks, farmers checking weather apps as well as markets, reporters in credential lines and parents doing the math on health-care premiums. They deserve answers that go beyond slogans and soundbites.

So walk with me, reader: pay attention not just to the headlines but to the small places where policy touches life. Watch how a single cabinet decision echoes in a church basement, a farmyard, a city bus. That’s where the long week becomes a long story — and where the course of a nation is quietly, insistently decided.

Israel Receives Remains of Hostage Handed Over by Hamas

hanad

October 18, 2025

Israel receives body of hostage returned by Hamas — Teams carry out excavation work to recover the bodies of Israeli hostages killed during the Israeli attacks on Khan Younis, Gaza

A Coffin, A Crossroads: What One Returned Body Reveals About Gaza’s Fragile Ceasefire

The metal hum of the Red Cross convoy was the kind of sound that makes you hold your breath — not from expectation, but from a weary, brittle hope.

Late one evening, under the blurred orange of floodlights and the salt-sour smell of the Mediterranean wind, a coffin believed to hold a hostage’s remains was handed over in Gaza. The International Committee of the Red Cross took custody of it and began the slow, careful work of moving it to Israeli army hands, according to an Israeli military statement. For families on both sides of this conflict, a single coffin can be a doorway to grief and to the complicated logistics of truth and closure.

Small gestures under enormous strain

“We were told to be ready,” said a woman who described herself as an aunt of a missing person, voice trembling over the phone. “All week my brother kept waking and asking if the phone had rung. When it did at night, it felt like a blow and a balm at once.”

The handover is one small, bruised part of a larger pause: a US-brokered ceasefire, negotiated with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, has largely halted major fighting. It has also exposed how fragile a pause can be when the work of burying the dead, identifying bodies and returning loved ones collides with politics, engineering and the wreckage of war.

Counting the missing and the dead

Numbers keep a rough ledger of what has happened — and what remains unresolved. Israel says it has received nine of 28 bodies that Hamas had held in Gaza. Earlier in the week, 20 living hostages taken during Hamas’s 7 October 2023 assault were returned. But dozens more remain unaccounted for, and families wait on every detail with a patience worn thin.

On the Gaza side, the Hamas-run health ministry has tallied at least 67,967 deaths since the war began — a figure the United Nations considers credible, though it does not distinguish between civilians and fighters. International agencies warn that more than half of the victims are women and children. These are not abstract numbers: they are a litany of funerals, of emptied chairs at tables, of schools converted into mass graves and hospitals reduced to triage tents.

“We are burying the past and the present at once”

“We are burying the past and the present at once,” said a 43-year-old community nurse in Gaza City, who asked not to be named for safety reasons. “Every day we are called to identify bodies under rubble. Sometimes all we can do is record a name.” Her voice was flat but not defeated — more like someone who has become fluent in sorrow.

Hamas has said it is committed to handing over all remaining bodies but has also appealed for heavy machinery to speed searches of rubble where people may be entombed. “We need diggers, excavators, cranes,” an unnamed Hamas official told mediators. “There are areas of collapse only machines can reach.” Israel, stressing that militants know where bodies are located, warned that time is limited.

Humanitarian supply lines — progress and limits

The temporary lull in fighting has opened a narrow window for aid. The UN World Food Programme has been averaging about 560 tonnes of food into Gaza per day since the ceasefire began — a substantial increase from zero convoys, but still far short of estimated needs. With famine conditions present in parts of Gaza, UN officials have repeatedly said that aid flows must scale up to thousands of trucks each week to avert mass starvation.

“We are not where we need to be,” said Abeer Etefa, a WFP spokesperson, at a Geneva briefing, noting that logistics remain nightmarish. Only 57 trucks reached southern and central Gaza one recent day — a “breakthrough,” she said — but the target is 80–100 trucks daily, and northern Gaza remains grimly inaccessible because of closed crossings and damaged roads.

Hospitals are collapsing under the strain. The World Health Organization has warned that infectious diseases are running rampant and that only 13 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially operational. “Whether meningitis, diarrhoea, respiratory illnesses — we’re talking about a mammoth amount of work,” Hanan Balkhy of WHO told AFP. In such conditions, the vacuum of governance and services becomes a conveyor belt toward more death.

Politics and accountability: The ICC and the shadow of warrants

In another corner of international law, the International Criminal Court has become a lightning rod. The court rejected Israel’s request to appeal arrest warrants issued for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, a decision that ricocheted through diplomatic channels. In November, judges found “reasonable grounds” to believe the officials bore responsibility for crimes in Gaza — a finding that inflamed passions in Israel and in parts of the United States.

“This is not about politics; it is about the rule of law,” said a human rights lawyer in The Hague, who asked to remain anonymous. “If accountability is negotiable, we have a problem.” Meanwhile, Israel and allied governments have contested the court’s jurisdiction and its authority to issue such warrants — underscoring how legal processes and battlefield realities now intersect in ways that will shape the region for years.

What comes next: borders, governance, and an international force?

Ceasefires are fragile by nature, and the plan being advanced includes not just pauses in shooting, but the heavy-lift tasks of reopening crossings, disarming militants, and rebuilding a devastated territory. Mediators and Western governments are already discussing an international stabilisation force to help hold the peace. France and Britain, coordinating with the United States, are pushing for a UN Security Council resolution to provide a legal basis for such a mission — one that would likely borrow from precedents like Haiti and permit “all necessary measures” to fulfil its mandate.

Potential contributors include Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Qatar and others, with Indonesia’s president even signalling a willingness to deploy tens of thousands of troops if called upon, under a UN mandate. Yet any stabilisation mission will face an immediate dilemma: security without legitimacy is empty, and operations in a place scarred by decades of distrust require more than soldiers — they require credibility, resources, and a plan for governance, reconstruction and reconciliation.

Questions for the world — and for ourselves

Who cares for the living when so many of the dead still need names? Can an international force help stitch together security and humanitarian relief without becoming another foreign presence that people resent? And perhaps most urgently: how do we turn the logistics of aid and the mechanics of law into something that feels human again?

When I asked a father in Kfar Saba, where a recently returned body was buried, what he wanted most now, he said simply: “A grave with a stone that says his name. Let him not be a number.” That single sentence carries the weight of an entire people’s yearning — for dignity, for acknowledgement, for the quiet rituals that let us grieve and begin to reckon with what was lost.

These are not just questions for leaders in capitals or judges in far-off courtrooms. They are questions for anyone who watches the news and wonders what our obligations are to strangers whose lives now intersect with ours through images, headlines and, sometimes, through a shared humanity that surfaces, startling and plain: we can count the bodies, but can we also count the ways we are responsible?

As convoys roll and diplomats draw maps of futures yet to be built, a coffin moves slowly across a checkpoint. It is a small act in the scale of geopolitics, and a monumental one in the life of a family. It is a reminder that amidst negotiations, legal rulings and military postures, the human story — grief, memory, and the desire for closure — remains stubbornly, urgently central.

Prince Andrew effectively cut off from royal family and public duties

hanad

October 18, 2025

Prince Andrew effectively banished from royal family — The UK's Prince Andrew is to stop using his remaining titles and honours, including the Duke of York

A Dynasty in Slow Motion: What Prince Andrew’s Fall From Grace Says About Power, Privilege and Accountability

On a crisp morning in Windsor, where clipped lawns and centuries of ceremony cross the horizon, a small but seismic decision quietly landed like a stone in a still pond.

Prince Andrew — the second son of the late Queen Elizabeth II, a man who has lived at the center of Britain’s monarchy for more than six decades — has relinquished the use of his title as the Duke of York. For centuries the royal household has been a study in continuity and ritual; this is disruption of a rare sort, the kind that sends ripples through palace corridors and living rooms alike.

“This was never simply about a title,” said a former palace aide who asked not to be named. “It’s about the institution protecting itself. King Charles has been watching a story that refuses to go away.”

The shadow that won’t lift

The shadow belongs, still, to Jeffrey Epstein — the disgraced financier who died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019. The stories, the documents, the photographs, the civil suits and the court filings have continued to surface, each new revelation stubbornly resurrecting questions about judgment and proximity to power.

For Prince Andrew the damage was cumulative. He stepped back from public duties in 2019 after an interview that many viewed as tone-deaf and self-defeating. In the years since, leaks and released emails have repeatedly undercut his public defenses. One 2011 email — disclosed in recent reporting — in which he wrote to Epstein, “it would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it,” provided a line that palace communicators could not smooth away.

“People think removing a title is ceremonial. It isn’t,” observed Dr. Amrita Sethi, a scholar of modern monarchies. “Symbols are the currency of royal power. When you start removing them, you are telling the public a story about limits.”

What changed, and what hasn’t

The move to strip the use of a dukedom feels both decisive and symbolic. It signals that even those born to privilege can be placed at the margins of royal life, yet it also reveals the limits of internal discipline. Andrew will remain a prince by birthright — that is part of the anatomy of royalty — but will no longer use the Duke of York title in official capacities. He retains use of Royal Lodge, a 30-room house near Windsor he occupies under a long lease, and he retains family ties even as his public role withers.

“It’s exile in plain sight,” said Carol-Anne Miller, who runs a tearoom near Windsor Castle. “He might be living around the corner, but for the pageants and for the public, he’s gone.”

Some see the action as overdue. Public institutions are under pressure globally to demonstrate accountability. The MeToo movement and a broader erosion of deference to elites have created an environment where silence or half-measures no longer suffice.

“You can pay a settlement,” said legal commentator Marcus Reid. “You can deny liability. But you can’t buy back public trust. That’s earned over a lifetime, and once lost it’s brutally hard to restore.”

Lives intersecting with headlines

People on the streets of Windsor have watched the story unfold as a kind of ongoing domestic soap opera. On Saturdays the market is full of locals — fishermen in wellies, mums with prams, retirees who remember coronations. Their observations are less about legal nuance than about character.

“He used to wave at the school runs,” said Lisa, a teacher who has lived in the town for three decades. “We all have friends who make mistakes. But this wasn’t a single lapse. It was… persistent. It made people uncomfortable.”

Across the Atlantic, civil suits and revelations continue to patchwork the image of how wealth and power can bend systems and shield behavior. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, brought a civil claim against Prince Andrew that was settled in 2022 for a multimillion-pound amount; the prince made no admission of liability. Her testimony and accounts have been central to public scrutiny. Giuffre has announced plans to publish a memoir about her experiences — another chapter that promises to keep attention focused on this entanglement.

Beyond one man: a larger cultural moment

Ask yourself: why does this story grip people not just in Britain but in New York, Delhi and Sydney? The answer touches something universal. It’s not merely the salaciousness of a scandal. It’s the core question of how systems respond when those at the summit are implicated — and whether institutions prioritize reputation over truth.

Recent polling over the past few years has shown younger generations in Britain becoming less inclined to support hereditary privilege. In YouGov surveys, the gap between older and younger respondents on questions about the monarchy’s role has been widening — a sign that symbols matter less to many, but accountability matters more.

“Institutions that relied on automatic reverence are discovering the cost of that dependency,” Dr. Sethi said. “The Crown’s challenge is to modernize its moral leadership without losing what makes it distinct.”

What comes next?

For Prince Andrew, life will be quieter and lonelier, perhaps more private than the public has seen in years. For the palace, it is a delicate balancing act: to signal to a skeptical public that the institution polices itself, while also preserving the mystique and uninterrupted continuity the monarchy sells to its supporters.

For the rest of us, this episode invites reflection. How do we weigh mercy against accountability? How do institutions survive scandal without losing legitimacy? And how do victims of abuse find redress in systems not designed with them in mind?

“We are in an era where people demand to see consequences,” said a human rights lawyer with experience in transnational abuse cases. “Titles can be taken away. That’s a start. But consequences also mean reform: better oversight, more transparency, and a willingness to face uncomfortable truths.”

As winter approaches and the royal household prepares for its rituals — the Sandringham Christmases, the liturgies at St. George’s, the slow pageant of anniversaries and memorials — the palpable question is whether these rituals can coexist with the unnerving overlap of privilege and accountability laid bare in recent years.

We watch with the curiosity of onlookers and the weight of citizens. The story is not over. It will be written in court filings and biographies, in memoirs and editorial columns, and perhaps in small acts of repair that will test whether an ancient institution can adapt to modern moral demands.

And we ask you, the reader: when an institution is more than a person, how should it answer — and to whom? The answer will shape not just a family, but the idea of public life itself.

New blood test identifies 50 cancers, shows promising early results

hanad

October 18, 2025

Blood test for 50 cancers delivers 'exciting' results — The blood test looks for the "fingerprint" of dozens of cancers, often picking up signs before symptoms even appear (stock pic)

The Blood Whisper: How a Single Test Could Rewire Cancer Detection — and What It Still Can’t Tell Us

It begins with a quiet prick of a needle, a small vial of blood that hums with invisible stories. In a bright clinic on the outskirts of a Midwestern town, a retired teacher named Linda sat on a plastic chair and watched the nurse cap the tube. “It felt like any other blood draw,” she told me. “But I left thinking this little sample might tell me something I wouldn’t have known until it was too late.”

That sense of small, patient hope is exactly the promise behind Galleri — a multi-cancer, blood-based screen designed to read the genetic and chemical fingerprints that tumours leave in the bloodstream. Presented recently at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Berlin, fresh results from the Pathfinder 2 study add weight to the idea that a single annual test could change how we find cancer.

What the new study shows

At its heart, Pathfinder 2 asked a practical question: when you add Galleri to the usual screening we already offer — mammograms for breast cancer, colon checks for colorectal cancer, and so on — what more do you find? Researchers enrolled more than 23,000 adults in the United States and Canada who had no symptoms and followed them for at least a year.

The headline numbers are striking. The test flagged a “cancer signal” in 216 people; of those, 133 were subsequently diagnosed with cancer — a positive predictive value of 61.6% in this cohort. In plain language, when Galleri suggested cancer might be present, it was right roughly six times out of ten. Even more remarkable: the test correctly ruled out cancer in 99.6% of people who ultimately did not have the disease — an exceptionally high specificity that keeps false alarms low.

And there’s a second, practical gift in the results: in 92% of cases, Galleri could point clinicians to the organ or tissue of origin. That matters because if a blood test tells you, for example, “this looks like it came from the pancreas,” doctors can aim CT or MRI scans more quickly and efficiently rather than launching into broad, costly investigations.

Most encouraging for patients — and painfully important for survival — was the stage at diagnosis. More than half (53.5%) of the cancers detected were stage I or II, and about 69.3% were found at stages I–III. Early-stage detection often means more treatment options and better outcomes.

Voices in the room: cautious optimism

“We’re really very excited,” said Harpal Kumar, president of International Business and BioPharma at Grail, the company behind Galleri, and a former head of Cancer Research UK. “This is another step along the way in really transforming cancer outcomes.”

Across the hallway from the conference hall, not everyone celebrated without caveats. “These findings are promising and reflect technical progress,” said Dr. Elena Morales, a medical oncologist who has worked in community and academic settings. “But we must remember: detecting a cancer signal is not the same as preventing a death. We need randomized data showing an impact on mortality and quality of life before we recalibrate national screening programs.”

That distinction is crucial. Modelling published earlier this year in BMJ Open suggested that annual multi-cancer screening could reduce late-stage diagnoses by about 49% and cut deaths by roughly 21% within five years compared with usual care. Models are helpful maps, not the territory — they forecast possibility, not proof.

Why this test matters globally

For decades, population screening has been a narrow art: regular checks for breast, cervical and colorectal cancer in many countries, and lung screening in selected high-risk groups. But the majority of cancers — including pancreatic, ovarian and certain upper gastrointestinal tumours — have no widely adopted screening tests and typically present late.

“Imagine being able to identify cancers that have been stealthy for years,” said Professor Adamu Kato, an epidemiologist who studies early detection strategies in resource-constrained settings. “It’s not just a question of saving lives, it’s also about saving the kind of suffering that comes from late diagnosis — long hospital stays, limited treatment options, the emotional and financial toll on families.”

There’s also a practical economics to consider. If Galleri reliably narrows the search to a specific organ, it can reduce the number of broad, expensive scans and invasive procedures that follow a non-specific symptom. In the Pathfinder 2 study, adding Galleri to existing screening increased the number of cancers found in a year by more than seven-fold compared with usual programs alone — a potent multiplier.

Not a silver bullet

Still, every advance in medicine must be weighed against potential harms. No test is perfect. Even at high specificity, false positives will occur and cause anxiety. False negatives — when an existing cancer isn’t detected — are also possible, offering false reassurance. Overdiagnosis, detection of indolent tumours that would never have caused harm in a person’s lifetime, is another risk that carries its own cascade of treatment and distress.

“We need to think about access and equity too,” warned Dr. Ayesha Rahman, a primary care physician who works in an underserved urban clinic. “If a test costs hundreds or even a thousand dollars and isn’t covered by public health systems, the very people who could benefit most might be left out.”

That’s an ethical knot. Precision tech has the power to widen disparities as quickly as it narrows diagnostic uncertainty. Policy choices — coverage, pricing, integration with public screening programs — will determine whether this becomes a universal tool or an added perk for those who can pay.

Where we go next

Large randomized trials are already underway in several countries to see if earlier detection translates into fewer cancer deaths. The medical community rightly wants hard outcomes: lives saved, not just tumours found. In the meantime, Pathfinder 2 offers a real-world look at how a blood test could sit alongside, and enhance, the screening we already do.

So what should you, as a reader standing at your own kitchen counter, take away? First, science is moving toward less invasive, more comprehensive ways to detect disease. Second, promising early results should not be mistaken for finished business — more evidence is coming. And third, the choices we make about access and integration will be as consequential as the technology itself.

When I asked Linda how she felt about the test now, she paused and looked toward the window. “It’s like being handed a map in a foreign city,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you won’t get lost, but it means your chances of finding the right street are a lot better.”

Will this map lead us out of late-stage despair and into a future where cancer is caught earlier, treated more gently, and survived more often? The path is opening — blood by blood — but it will take wisdom, solidarity and rigorous science to walk it.

Israel Confirms Identity of Deceased Hostage Returned by Hamas

hanad

October 18, 2025

Israel identifies body of dead hostage returned by Hamas — Protesters standing with portraits of Israeli hostages including Eliyahu Margalit (pictured bottom left) in October 2024

Returned, Remembered: The Quiet, Sharp Grief After a Body Comes Home

When the small white van eased into the driveway of Kibbutz Nir Oz late on a cool evening, the air around the cluster of low-slung houses seemed to hold its breath. Word spreads differently in places like this — by murmured phone calls, the slow clink of teacups set down in doorways, the rustle of movement in corridors once so familiar. Families gathered not for celebration, but to receive the body of a man who had been stolen from them in the first hours of a war that still will not stop reshaping their lives.

Officials in Jerusalem confirmed overnight that the remains returned by Gaza via the Red Cross have been identified as 75-year-old Eliyahu “Eli” Margalit, a retired gardener and lifelong resident of the kibbutz. He was taken during the Oct. 7, 2023 assault that tore through border communities and ignited the conflict that followed. For his loved ones, the arrival of his remains is a confluence of relief, sorrow, and the thin comfort that comes with having someone to put in the ground.

Homecomings that are not yet home

The transfer, coordinated by humanitarian intermediaries and medical authorities, brought an end to weeks of uncertainty. “We got the call at midnight,” said Yael, a neighbor who has lived at Nir Oz for three decades and who asked that her last name not be used. “You don’t ever imagine it will be your friend. Then you see the flag, the careful way they handle him, and everything that was ordinary falls away.”

On paper, some facts are straightforward: Mr. Margalit was 75; his daughter, Nili, had been among those abducted and was returned under an earlier hostage release in November 2023; he leaves behind a wife, three children and grandchildren. But the numbers — like the tally of hostages or the dead — are lacework over a much more jagged reality. Israeli officials say 28 hostages are known to have died in captivity; to date, the militant group has handed over the remains of 10 of those people and returned 20 surviving hostages as part of a negotiated pause in fighting. Parties to the agreement had been expected to complete the handover of all the living and the dead by a set deadline, a deadline that has now lapsed and become another contested point.

“Returning a body is not the end of the story,” said Dr. Helena Abramov, a forensic anthropologist who has worked on identification efforts in conflict zones. “It is a crucial step in allowing families to grieve, to perform their rituals, and to establish a form of truth. But closure — if any exists — is partial. Many questions remain: about how he died, about who else is still missing, about the terms of the trade that brought these remains home.”

A chorus of voices, a clash of narratives

From the prime minister’s office came a terse refrain familiar in wartime: a vow not to relent until all the abducted are returned. “We will not spare any effort to bring every fallen and living hostage home,” an official statement read, its cadence part admonition, part promise.

From the other side, Hamas spokespeople emphasized compliance with agreed terms. “We continue to uphold the ceasefire framework and are working to complete the prisoner exchange process,” a statement attributed to a spokesperson said, reiterating that the militant group had fulfilled parts of the agreement while urging the other side to meet its own obligations.

Between those statements are families like the Margalits’ — people whose days are now full of the ordinariness of mourning: deciding on burial rites, sitting shiva with neighbors, collecting photographs and stories to tell and retell so the person who is gone does not evaporate into a headline. “Eliyahu loved the almond trees along the east fence,” Nili reportedly told a friend after her father’s return. “He would prune them every winter like he was pruning the sky.” Such small, luminous details are the scaffolding of a life, and their retrieval is as important to many families as the official pronouncements.

Why the return of remains matters — and why it complicates peace

Humanitarian law has long held that the dead have rights too: to identification, to dignified handling, and to return to their families when possible. The Red Cross and other agencies frequently act as intermediaries in such exchanges, because they are among the few organizations both sides accept as neutral enough to oversee sensitive transfers. Yet even these operations are not merely administrative. They are political acts loaded with symbolism, bargaining power and public emotion.

“When a body is returned, it changes the bargaining table,” said Michael Lichtenstein, a former negotiator who has worked on hostage recovery in several conflicts. “It removes an element of ambiguity; it forces parties and publics to confront the human consequences of policy. That’s why returns are both sought and delayed: they are humanitarian, and they are leverage.”

This tug-of-war is visible in the numbers: the specific count of bodies delivered, the pace of returns, the sequencing of prisoners and hostages. Each move is read and reread through the prism of strategy and suffering. For families, however, the calculations are less abstract. The task is visceral: to lay out a body to face beloved faces one last time, to observe religious rites — or, for some, to decide alternatives when traditional rituals are impossible.

Local color: life along the border

Nir Oz sits within the thin, green strip of Israeli farmland that breathes with the ebb and flow of seasons and geopolitics. Mornings used to begin with the mooing of cows and the clatter of tractors. Now the soundscape is different: distant military vehicles, hums of drones overhead, gatherings that alternate between prayer and debate. Still, neighbors recall simpler times — barbecues under studded skies, children chasing each other between almond trees.

“We met for Friday salads and music under an old eucalyptus,” said Reuven, a retired teacher who runs a community library in the kibbutz. “Now, we meet mostly to count and to mourn. That is the cruelty of this place — life insists on continuing, but the seams have been torn.”

Asking the hard questions

What does a return mean for justice? For reconciliation? For the political calculations that govern every ceasefire and exchange? When the dead are returned, does it reduce pressure for a broader resolution, or does it create the space where people can actually speak? These are not academic queries: they shape policy, and they shape the contours of grief.

Readers who watch these events from afar might wonder: How do societies rebuild after such dislocation? How do neighbors, who once harvested tomatoes together, learn to trust again? The answer is both mundane and profound: in small acts of remembrance and the slow labor of rebuilding social ties. For the Margalit family, rebuilding will begin with the burial, with stories told to grandchildren, and with the careful tending of a garden where the grandfather once worked.

In the weeks ahead, more bodies may be returned, more names confirmed, more doors closed and then reopened. Each is its own world of sorrow and memory. As diplomats haggle and politicians posture, those left behind will keep doing the work few headlines fully capture: preparing graves, carrying candles, and — sometimes — finding reasons to laugh at an old joke that refuses to die.

What would you do if your community was rewritten overnight? How would you honor both the living and the dead amid a landscape of loss? These are not abstract questions; they are the quiet reckonings families like the Margalits confront now, with hearts that beat like everyone else’s and stories that insist on being told.

US jury finds French bank facilitated atrocities in Sudan

hanad

October 18, 2025

US jury finds French bank enabled Sudanese atrocities — The French bank BNP Paribas did business in Sudan from the late 1990's until 2009

The Verdict That Echoed Across Continents

In a Manhattan courtroom this week, a jury of eight people rendered a decision that sounded less like a ledger entry and more like a thunderclap: France’s banking giant BNP Paribas was found to have aided genocide in Sudan by providing financial services that, according to the jury, violated U.S. sanctions.

The award—more than $20 million to three survivors who fled Sudan and now live in the United States—was not just a number. It was a judgment steeped in stories of fire, smoke, and loss. It was testimony from two men and one woman who recounted being tortured, burned with cigarettes, cut with knives and, in the woman’s case, sexually assaulted.

Faces Behind the Ruling

The plaintiffs did not stand as abstractions. They arrived in court carrying the language of survival: memories of villages emptied by Janjaweed militias, of fields left fallow, of family photos singed and gone. “I watched my brother fall,” one plaintiff said, her voice tight with memory. “We hid under a tree while the trucks came. Money bought those trucks.”

Their attorney, Bobby DiCello, told reporters afterward that the verdict represented more than personal compensation. “This is a victory for justice and accountability,” he said. “The jury recognized that financial institutions cannot turn a blind eye to the consequences of their actions. Our clients lost everything to a campaign of destruction fueled by U.S. dollars that BNP Paribas facilitated and that should have been stopped.”

A spokesperson for BNP Paribas responded with a statement passed to AFP: “This ruling is clearly wrong and there are very strong grounds to appeal the verdict, which is based on a distortion of controlling Swiss law and ignores important evidence the bank was not permitted to introduce.” The bank’s lawyers have already signaled they will take the case to higher courts.

How a Bank Becomes Part of a War

To understand how a bank ended up in a genocide trial, you need to read the ledger as part of a landscape of commerce. BNP Paribas, one of Europe’s largest banks, operated in Sudan from the late 1990s until 2009, providing letters of credit that allowed Khartoum to honor its import and export commitments.

These financial guarantees—paper assurances that a seller will get paid—are the plumbing of global trade. In this case they helped Sudan keep cotton, oil and other commodities moving to overseas buyers. The plaintiffs and their lawyers argued those transactions funneled billions into a government campaign that targeted specific ethnic communities in Darfur and elsewhere.

“A letter of credit looks innocuous,” said Professor Mira Al-Najjar, an international finance expert at a New York law school. “But when those letters keep government coffers filled, they can sustain militarised repression. Banking isn’t neutral when it props up machinery of violence.”

Numbers That Matter

Jury size: 8 members.
Award: Over $20 million to three plaintiffs.
BNP Paribas’ Sudan activity: late 1990s to 2009, according to court filings.
Darfur conflict estimates: The war beginning in 2003 has been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions—figures that international bodies and humanitarian groups have long debated but agree are devastating in scale.

Voices from the Diaspora

In Brooklyn and Minneapolis, in London and Khartoum, the verdict punctured a quiet that many refugees had carried for years. Layla Hassan, who fled Darfur in 2005 and now runs a community center in Queens, said the ruling felt like recognition: “For so long, our pain was only whispered. Today, people with power—people with numbers and papers—had to hear those whispers and say, ‘You are not invisible.’”

Another survivor, speaking outside the courthouse, was more wary. “Money cannot bring back children,” he said. “But it can remind the world of what it did not stop.”

What This Case Signals Globally

The trial sits at the intersection of three larger currents sweeping the global order: the increasing willingness of courts to hold corporations accountable for human-rights harms, the complexities of sanctions enforcement, and the opaque role of finance in modern conflict.

Legal scholars say this case could widen the aperture through which we view corporate responsibility. “We’re witnessing a shift,” said Daniel Koehler, a human-rights lawyer who has worked on corporate accountability cases in Europe. “Companies can no longer hide behind jurisdictional boundaries and banking formalities when their services materially advance mass atrocities.”

At the same time, governments have leaned more heavily on economic tools—sanctions, asset freezes, trade restrictions—as instruments of foreign policy. Those tools rely on banks to execute or block transactions, making financial institutions both instruments of and potential bulwarks against state violence.

Questions for the Reader

When should a bank say no? How much diligence is enough to prevent a letter of credit from becoming a pipeline to terror? And what is the moral accounting when profits meet power?

Ask yourself: Do we assume the financial world is detached from the blood and soil of conflict zones? Or is it time to acknowledge that wire transfers and letters of credit can be as consequential as bullets?

Local Color and Human Cost

Darfur’s savannahs, once patterned with millet fields and nomadic herds, have the quiet of places emptied too quickly. Stories from survivors are specific and granular: the taste of smoke in a child’s hair, the rusted roar of militia trucks, the sudden absence of a neighbor who used to repair broken hoes. Cotton fields that fed families became commodities on foreign ships’ manifests.

“My father used to sing to the cotton,” one plaintiff recalled. “We sold the cotton to pay for weddings, for medicine. Then the same cotton bought guns.”

What Comes Next

BNP Paribas has vowed to appeal. The bank’s legal team will argue procedural errors and point to legal complexities—Swiss law, international banking norms, and the tangled web of contracts that move across borders.

For the survivors, appeals will mean more waiting. But even if the award is overturned, the verdict has a life beyond the courtroom: it sets a precedent in public conscience. There is a rhythm to accountability that runs far beyond legal briefs—press releases, board meetings, reputational risk and, sometimes, policy reform.

“No verdict undoes our lives,” one plaintiff said softly. “But it opens a door. Maybe another family will not have to sit where we sat.”

Final Reflections

We live in an era where capital moves at the speed of light, but consequences lag. The BNP Paribas verdict asks us to bridge that gap—to make moral sense of financial flows and to consider whether the systems we rely on for trade and credit should bear a clearer duty of care.

What responsibility should global banks accept when their services can tip the balance between civilian life and mass violence? How should societies balance the expediencies of commerce with the imperative to prevent harm?

Questions, not easy answers, are what courts and communities will wrestle with next. Whatever the legal outcome on appeal, this case has already rewritten the conversation: it placed at the center of American jurisprudence the idea that a bank’s pages of signatures and guarantees can, in some circumstances, be measured against the lives they help—or harm.

Kremlin Abuzz at Prospect of a Trump-Putin Meeting

hanad

October 18, 2025

The Summit That Sparked a Kremlin Rally: How a Single Phone Call Became a Storyline

The midday news opener on Russia’s most-watched state channel felt less like information and more like curtain-raising: “Donald Trump has heard Vladimir Putin — a bad sign for warmongers,” the announcer intoned, voice steady, the map of Europe glowing behind him.

It was a line designed to do everything that modern propaganda does best: condense a complicated diplomatic moment into a moral fable, draw clear heroes and villains, and invite viewers to feel both vindicated and threatened. Three and a half years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian state television presented a simple thesis — the warmongers are not in Moscow; they are in Brussels, London and Berlin. The friend, on the other hand, is the one who picks up the phone.

Why Hungary?

When word slipped out that a face-to-face meeting between the U.S. and Russian leaders might be prepared in “the coming days,” according to an aide to Vladimir Putin, chatter quickly converged on a single name: Budapest. “Hungary has always been the voice of wisdom and peacekeeping in Europe,” Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s close economic envoy, said in a statement that was aired repeatedly across pro-government outlets.

It’s a neat narrative arc. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s conservative prime minister, has often been painted as the troublesome sibling in the European family — skeptical of sanctions, courting Russian investment, and wary of any policy that might unmoor his domestic agenda. For Moscow, calling a summit in Hungary plays like theatre: a picturesque Central European capital, a hospitable host, and the implicit message that not all of Europe is rowing in the same direction.

Stagecraft and Signals

These summits are as much about optics as they are about outcomes. A handshake in a silk-paneled room, waves caught on-camera, a joint photo op — those images rewrite headlines and remake reputations. “Putin thrives on the ritual of summitry,” an American foreign policy analyst told me. “Every face-to-face meeting is, for him, an act of legitimation. It signals he’s not a pariah but a player.”

For many Kremlin commentators, the meeting itself is a strategic score. “A personal meeting is arguably his favourite thing to do,” said one commentator on the popular program Time Will Tell, where three-hour panels of pundits and political guests parse every whisper out of the Kremlin. “It elevates him globally.”

What the Kremlin Is Selling

Across Russia’s pro-government media there’s a steady, repeated argument: that the U.S. — or at least a U.S. leader willing to speak directly to Putin — represents a corrective to a quarrelsome and increasingly isolated Europe. Britain and Germany, for example, have been singled out for criticism as the supposed engines of escalation. “They moved the locomotive of war,” a repeat line on morning shows suggested, in language meant to conjure hubristic empire-builders.

The rhetorical pivot is simple. Europe is cast as the coalition of “warmongers,” the U.S. as the pragmatist or at least the debater, and Hungary as the calm, steady voice. In opinion pieces and talk shows, a phrase like “coalition of losers” is trotted out to describe Ukraine’s allies — a clear counterpoint to the earlier Western talk of a “coalition of the willing.”

How the Narrative Lands in Budapest

Walk the Danube embankment in Budapest and you’ll find people nodding, shrugging, or furrowing their brows at the idea of hosting great-power choreography. “If it brings a chance to stop the killing, why not?” said Anna K., a 62-year-old history teacher sipping espresso near the Parliament. “But we also know how the show works — it doesn’t mean promises are kept.”

A street vendor selling paprika and postcards laughed ruefully when I asked whether Hungarians relish the attention. “We like visitors,” he said, “but we are not props in someone else’s fight.”

Smoke, Mirrors—and a Negotiating Playbook

Beyond the pageantry, analysts warn there is a familiar pattern in Moscow’s diplomacy: charm, delay, and revision. “There’s a formula — flattery first, then evasion,” a seasoned diplomat with experience on Eastern European files told me. “You leave the summit with pictures and statements. You often don’t leave with the concessions or mechanisms that end a war.”

That has been the frequent complaint from Kyiv and many Western capitals: meetings without sustainable tracks for de-escalation or enforceable mechanisms. At the same time, to Russia, a summit with the U.S. leader — especially if the leader is presented domestically as congenial — rewrites the argument about isolation. It says: Russia remains a country whose word matters.

What’s at Stake: Beyond Choreography

Ask yourself: are we watching diplomacy or theatre? The answer matters because the human toll does not perform on cue. Since February 24, 2022, the war in Ukraine has displaced millions, shattered lives, and redrawn security calculations across Europe. International monitors and humanitarian agencies have documented enormous civilian suffering — the kind that a hand-written communique can’t erase.

“Summits can quiet headlines for a day,” said a humanitarian worker who has worked in Ukrainian displacement camps. “But without concrete, verified steps — ceasefires, withdrawal, humanitarian corridors — the cameras won’t stop the suffering.”

Echoes of a Larger Crisis

What plays out in television studios and state bulletins connects to deeper themes: the fragility of alliances in polarized times, the performative power of leadership, and the way information channels shape public belief. An electorate that relies on a single dominant source of news is especially vulnerable to narratives that simplify complexity into winners and losers.

And there is another layer: the domestic politics that both shape and are shaped by these international dramas. Leaders use summits to burnish profiles at home. Public diplomacy becomes campaign fodder, and foreign policy becomes a stage for domestic validation.

Questions to Take Away

So where does that leave the rest of us? Does a meeting in Budapest mark a turning point, a pause, or simply a new sequence of managed expectations? Will images of handshakes be followed by enforceable actions that ease suffering, or will they be another episode in a long-running series of diplomatic theatre?

Those are questions best answered by what comes after the cameras are packed away: the paper, the clauses, the monitoring teams, and, most importantly, the lived experience of people on the ground.

As one Ukrainian volunteer put it to me over a late-night phone call: “Photos are nice. Food on the table is nicer.” It’s a blunt way to remind us that the real metric of diplomacy should not be how it looks but who it helps.

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